Application of Optimization in Production, Logistics, Inventory, Supply Chain Management and Block Chain

The evolution of industrial development since the 18th century is now experiencing the fourth industrial revolution. The effect of the development has propagated into almost every sector of the industry. From inventory to the circular economy, the effectiveness of technology has been fruitful for industry. The recent trends in research, with new ideas and methodologies, are included in this book. Several new ideas and business strategies are developed in the area of the supply chain management, logistics, optimization, and forecasting for the improvement of the economy of the society and the environment. The proposed technologies and ideas are either novel or help modify several other new ideas. Different real life problems with different dimensions are discussed in the book so that readers may connect with the recent issues in society and industry. The collection of the articles provides a glimpse into the new research trends in technology, business, and the environment

Formulation of a cislunar human transportation architecture through the use of analytic, heuristic, and parametric algorithms

The purpose of this study was to conduct a conceptual design study for a lunar transfer vehicle, thus considering the question of whether or not it is possible to conduct a human lunar return given a restriction to exclusively use currently existing technology. A variety of analytic, parametric, and heuristic techniques were used to develop a comprehensive vehicle design. A modular design resulted, consisting of six component spacecraft and an associated mission control environment. A cost analysis was performed to determine an approximate funding level required to support such a vehicle. Recommendations for integration of this lunar transfer vehicle design with a lunar surface base are provided as well as recommendations for further research

Manufacturing Management and Decision Support using Simulation-based Multi-Objective Optimisation

A majority of the established automotive manufacturers are under severe competitive pressure and their long term economic sustainability is threatened. In particular the transformation towards more CO2-efficient energy sources is a huge financial burden for an already investment capital intensive industry. In addition existing operations urgently need rapid improvement and even more critical is the development of highly productive, efficient and sustainable manufacturing solutions for new and updated products. Simultaneously, a number of severe drawbacks with current improvement methods for industrial production systems have been identified. In summary, variation is not considered sufficient with current analysis methods, tools used are insufficient for revealing enough knowledge to support decisions, procedures for finding optimal solutions are not considered, and information about bottlenecks is often required, but no accurate methods for the identification of bottlenecks are used in practice, because they do not normally generate any improvement actions. Current methods follow a trial-and-error pattern instead of a proactive approach. Decisions are often made directly on the basis of raw static historical data without an awareness of optimal alternatives and their effects. These issues could most likely lead to inadequate production solutions, low effectiveness, and high costs, resulting in poor competitiveness. In order to address the shortcomings of existing methods, a methodology and framework for manufacturing management decision support using simulation-based multi-objective optimisation is proposed. The framework incorporates modelling and the optimisation of production systems, costs, and sustainability. Decision support is created through the extraction of knowledge from optimised data. A novel method and algorithm for the detection of constraints and bottlenecks is proposed as part of the framework. This enables optimal improvement activities with ranking in order of importance can be sought. The new method can achieve a higher improvement rate, when applied to industrial improvement situations, compared to the well-established shifting bottleneck technique. A number of “laboratory” experiments and real-world industrial applications have been conducted in order to explore, develop, and verify the proposed framework. The identified gaps can be addressed with the proposed methodology. By using simulation-based methods, stochastic behaviour and variability is taken into account and knowledge for the creation of decision support is gathered through post-optimality analysis. Several conflicting objectives can be considered simultaneously through the application of multi-objective optimisation, while objectives related to running cost, investments and other sustainability parameters can be included through the use of the new cost and sustainability models introduced. Experiments and tests have been undertaken and have shown that the proposed framework can assist the creation of manufacturing management decision support and that such a methodology can contribute significantly to regaining profitability when applied within the automotive industry. It can be concluded that a proof-of-concept has been rigorously established for the application of the proposed framework on real-world industrial decision-making, in a manufacturing management context.Volvo Car Corporation, Sweden University of Skövde, Swede

BUILDING DSS USING KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASE APPLIED TO ADMISSION & REGISTRATION FUNCTIONS

This research investigates the practical issues surrounding the development and implementation of Decision Support Systems (DSS). The research describes the traditional development approaches analyzing their drawbacks and introduces a new DSS development methodology. The proposed DSS methodology is based upon four modules; needs' analysis, data warehouse (DW), knowledge discovery in database (KDD), and a DSS module. The proposed DSS methodology is applied to and evaluated using the admission and registration functions in Egyptian Universities. The research investigates the organizational requirements that are required to underpin these functions in Egyptian Universities. These requirements have been identified following an in-depth survey of the recruitment process in the Egyptian Universities. This survey employed a multi-part admission and registration DSS questionnaire (ARDSSQ) to identify the required data sources together with the likely users and their information needs. The questionnaire was sent to senior managers within the Egyptian Universities (both private and government) with responsibility for student recruitment, in particular admission and registration. Further, access to a large database has allowed the evaluation of the practical suitability of using a data warehouse structure and knowledge management tools within the decision making framework. 1600 students' records have been analyzed to explore the KDD process, and another 2000 records have been used to build and test the data mining techniques within the KDD process. Moreover, the research has analyzed the key characteristics of data warehouses and explored the advantages and disadvantages of such data structures. This evaluation has been used to build a data warehouse for the Egyptian Universities that handle their admission and registration related archival data. The decision makers' potential benefits of the data warehouse within the student recruitment process will be explored. The design of the proposed admission and registration DSS (ARDSS) will be developed and tested using Cool: Gen (5.0) CASE tools by Computer Associates (CA), connected to a MSSQL Server (6.5), in a Windows NT (4.0) environment. Crystal Reports (4.6) by Seagate will be used as a report generation tool. CLUST AN Graphics (5.0) by CLUST AN software will also be used as a clustering package. Finally, the contribution of this research is found in the following areas: A new DSS development methodology; The development and validation of a new research questionnaire (i.e. ARDSSQ); The development of the admission and registration data warehouse; The evaluation and use of cluster analysis proximities and techniques in the KDD process to find knowledge in the students' records; And the development of the ARDSS software that encompasses the advantages of the KDD and DW and submitting these advantages to the senior admission and registration managers in the Egyptian Universities. The ARDSS software could be adjusted for usage in different countries for the same purpose, it is also scalable to handle new decision situations and can be integrated with other systems

Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

This book presents the collection of fifty papers which were presented in the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY 2011 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments , held in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, from 22ndto 24thof June, 2011.The main motive of the meeting was growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, and creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily companies and their businesses. Due to this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability 2.0” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Also, the notation“2.0” is to promote the publication as a step further from our previous publication – “Business Sustainability I” – as would be for a new version of software. Concerning the Second International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participation, in accordance with the Conference's assumed mission to promote Proactive Generative Collaborative Learning, the Conference Organisation shares/puts open to the community the papers presented in this book, as well as the papers presented on the previous Conference(s). These papers can be accessed from the conference webpage (http://labve.dps.uminho.pt/bs11). In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 107 authors from 11 countries, namely from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, and United States of America. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope, and would like, that this book to be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the third of which is planned for year 2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Investigation on Benefit-Cost Analysis of Greenhouse Structures in Antalya

Significant population increase across the world, loss of cultivable land and increasing demand for food put pressure on agriculture. To meet the demand, greenhouses are built, which are, light structures with transparent cladding material in order to provide controlled microclimatic environment proper for plant production. Conceptually, greenhouses are similar with manufacturing buildings where a controlled environment for manufacturing and production have been provided and proper spaces for standardized production processes have been enabled. Parallel with the trends in the world, particularly in southern regions, greenhouse structures have been increasingly constructed and operated in Turkey. A significant number of greenhouses are located at Antalya. The satellite images demonstrated that for over last three decades, there has been a continuous invasion of greenhouses on all cultivable land. There are various researches and attempts for the improvement of greenhouse design and for increasing food production by decreasing required energy consumption. However, the majority of greenhouses in Turkey are very rudimentary structures where capital required for investment is low, but maintenance requirements are high when compared with new generation greenhouse structures. In this research paper, life-long capital requirements for construction and operation of greenhouse buildings in Antalya has been investigated by using benefit-cost analysis study

Knowledge Capturing in Design Briefing Process for Requirement Elicitation and Validation

Knowledge capturing and reusing are major processes of knowledge management that deal with the elicitation of valuable knowledge via some techniques and methods for use in actual and further studies, projects, services, or products. The construction industry, as well, adopts and uses some of these concepts to improve various construction processes and stages. From pre-design to building delivery knowledge management principles and briefing frameworks have been implemented across project stakeholders: client, design teams, construction teams, consultants, and facility management teams. At pre-design and design stages, understanding the client’s needs and users’ knowledge are crucial for identifying and articulating the expected requirements and objectives. Due to underperforming results and missed goals and objectives, many projects finish with highly dissatisfied clients and loss of contracts for some organizations. Knowledge capturing has beneficial effects via its principles and methods on requirement elicitation and validation at the briefing stage between user, client and designer. This paper presents the importance and usage of knowledge capturing and reusing in briefing process at pre-design and design stages especially the involvement of client and user, and explores the techniques and technologies that are usable in briefing process for requirement elicitation

An Integration of a Buffering Assessment Model Using Fuzzy Logic with Lean Management for Improving Highway Construction Process

This research develops an integration system framework of Last Planner system, and a proper buffering assessment model called FLBM using fuzzy logic. It focuses on increasing the reliability of buffers to match the actual degree of variation. Simulation of the model was accomplished in MATLAB using sample data to verify the model theoretically. A case study was simulated through FLBM to validate the credibility of the model